Author: Bottomley, Samuel
Biography:
BOTTOMLEY, Samuel (1738-95: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 17 Dec. 1738 at Saddleworth, Yorkshire, the third child and eldest son of Michael Bottomley, clothier, and Sarah Andrew, who had married in 1734. Nothing is known of his education. The family lived in a comfortable cottage above Saddleworth church called “Gravemakers” (now known as “Cross Keys”). Samuel followed his father into the clothier trade, inherited Gravemakers on his father’s death in 1783 and also became a sometime innkeeper. He is not to be confused with the preacher Samuel Bottomley of Scarborough who lived to 1832. Greenfield is dated “[1820]” in most library catalogues, echoing several more or less unreliable sources. However, it is clear that the poem was in circulation during Bottomley’s lifetime. John Aikin referred to it in 1795 and newspaper death notices mentioned Greenfield and other poems. It therefore seems likely that the first edition of 22 pages (copies at Oldham Local Studies, Yorkminster, Nostell Priory--miscatalogued as Manchester 1820--and Peterhouse College, Cambridge) was printed around 1780 and before Sir George Armitage of Kirklees Hall, to whom it is dedicated, died in 1783. The posthumous edition of 64 pages with a “Historical Sketch” by Bottomley’s brother James was published at Manchester in 1817 and is held by numerous libraries. A third edition was published at Ashton-under-Lyne in 1832, with copies at the Saddleworth Museum and Cambridge. Bottomley died on 26 June 1795 at Gravemakers and was buried on 29 June at St. Chad’s, Saddleworth. He appears not to have married and the major beneficiaries of his will were his half-brother, John, and his two surviving sisters. (ancestry.co.uk 16 June 2023; Leeds Intelligencer 6 July 1795; Bath Chronicle 23 July 1795; Manchester Mercury 21 July 1795; John Radcliffe, ed., The Parish Registers of St. Chad, Saddleworth [1891], 482n-3n; Victor Khadem, “Landscape, history and folklore in Samuel Bottomley’s Greenfield: a Poem” in Nigel Smith, ed., History in the South Pennines [2017], 305-42; Joseph Bradbury, Saddleworth Sketches [1871], 5-7, 81-2; John Aikin, A Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester [1795], 559; Will 1797, Lancashire Archives WCW/Supra/C562B/8) AA
Other Names:
- S. Bottomley